The bible specifically says we’re weaker

This post makes no attempt to argue the case for servanthood with those of you outside the Christian faith. However, for modern women who consider themselves a part of the Christian faith, this all too common reaction should be alarming. Are we really so prideful that the very suggestion that we take a humble and serving attitude towards our husbands instantly unbridles our tongues and sets our anger blazing?

“Prideful” – is that what it is? But aren’t we always being told that it was Christianity that introduced the idea of human equality to a brutal pagan world? If Christianity is big on equality, why is it supposed to be Christian to think women who have husbands should take a humble and serving attitude towards them? Why isn’t it Christian to take an egalitarian attitude towards them? Why is that called prideful?

I don’t know the answers.

Do we not realize that Sarah called Abraham “master?” That Eve was created specifically as Adam’s “helper?” That man was not made for woman, but that woman was made for man? That the Bible specifically calls us the “weaker partner?”

If we don’t, then we are either not reading our Bibles, or we have let culture influence us to the point where we would rather explain away these “pesky woman passages” by casting aside Biblical inerrancy so we can maintain our pride and sense of entitlement.

So if you’re weaker you’re supposed to be submissive and obedient, is that it? So stronger people should always have the upper hand? So might makes right? So stronger people should just take whatever they want, and if weaker people can’t stop them, that’s how god meant things to be, is that it?

36 Responses to “The bible specifically says we’re weaker”

When you first posted about this, I had a glance at the quotes, and the titles (Can he trust that you will take care of your duties?) and assumed that you were reading a book from 1920 or somesuch, or even the 19th century.

Tiffany is the oldest of two children, a 2007 homeschool graduate, and now a twenty-year-old college graduate as of May 2010. She majored in English literature and has a passion for reading, writing, and discovering God’s plan for beautiful womanhood. For over a year she has been blogging at True Femininity, which chronicles all the little things in her life as she journeys towards true femininity, such as her favorite interests: homemaking, cooking, fashion, frugal living, homeschooling, and theology.

What an eloquent testimony to the benefits of homeschooling. I wonder what college she graduated from?

But the fact of the matter is that verses like these are part of the Biblical portrait of what a woman is, and if we challenge them on the basis of cultural relativity or “Paul’s personal prejudice against women” then we can challenge any other statement in the Bible, and our faith becomes a personal–and, dare I say it– ridiculous fabrication of pick-and-choose “religion,” founded on the whims of human opinion rather than on every Word that proceeds from the Father’s mouth.

Ah, memory. My dear departed, and Christian, mother despised Paul, and her example taught me that there are parts of the bible that can be rejected. Once you accept that…

If God in His indescribable power was able to submit Himself and make Himself lowly, how can we in our weakness claim we deserve more rights, more power, more honor?

It is a relief to know that “God’s plan for beautiful womanhood” allows modern women to pursue interests in both fashion and theology. We can look forward to the upcoming fall line of Tiffany’s bridles for young Christian ladies. I’m so excited, anticipating the look of joy on my wife’s face when I show her the nice frilly pink one I picked out for her birthday.

Ophelia: But aren’t we always being told that it was Christianity that introduced the idea of human equality to a brutal pagan world?

But, you see, they claim to have invented good things when it suits their purpose to do so. They have been relativists for centuries. They have claimed ownership and creation of many things that they did not create and do not own. Morality, freedom, monotheism, the whole world, etc.

Reminds me of the kid inventing a story of how the big cheese flavor gets into little cheese crackers. And its just as cheesy.

It’s probably just me, but when one group calls themselves “teabaggers” and another promotes submission I start to wonder if they’re just messing with us. Are gerbils going to be the next right wing craze?

At least they’re not pretending the Bible doesn’t say what it clearly does say…

Ken Pidcock said:

Ah, memory. My dear departed, and Christian, mother despised Paul, and her example taught me that there are parts of the bible that can be rejected. Once you accept that…

I’ve met more Christians who claim that Paul should be ignored, because only the gospels themselves are important. They also claim that this is an entirely mainstream idea. I always wonder: if that is true, why is Paul still in the Bibles that they use at their churches and at home?

Deepak Shetty said:

I also wonder that there are so many people who try to reconcile evolution with the Bible – but so few who try and reconcile the misogynist parts.

Indeed, from what I can tell people just kind of ignore this issue, or pretend it doesn’t exist, instead of reconciling it. Their problem is that the usual excuse – “It’s only a metaphor” – doesn’t work here. Even if the story of Adam and Eve is not to be read as a historic event, but more like a fairy tale, one of the clearest morals of that story is “women are inferior”.

They can’t, but the standard being used here about “pridefulness” is “obedience to God/God’s law.” For them it isn’t a hypocritical double-standard, because the rules are simply different for men and women. I imagine, if you asked, they would (mostly) say that men and women are of equal value, but because they’re different, they have different roles in God’s plan.

What is, however, hypocrisy is the typical resorting to using the Bible as a great big book of multiple choice. Consider:

Do we not realize that God laid out very clearly the rules for owning slaves? That not only was it permissible to own them, but that as long as they weren’t Jews, there weren’t many restrictions at all on their treatment? That even if they were, there were ways to keep even Jews enslaved forever, through marriage?

If we don’t, then we are either not reading our Bibles, or we have let culture influence us to the point where we would rather explain away these “pesky slavery passages” by casting aside Biblical inerrancy so we can maintain our public image and sense of moral decency.

Unless this woman is a much, much worse person than I’d already consider her by what she’s said thus far, I doubt very much that she bases her views on slavery on the things God has said about it in the Bible. If she had, well, she’d be arguing for its reinstatement. Or at least saying it wasn’t all that bad a thing to do. Yet she decides it’s “prideful” for women to deny the truth as she’s come to see it.

No, in fact, it is most likely this woman has gotten her views about morality the same way most religious folk do: through indoctrination and societal acculturation & isolation. We no longer live in a society where many parents tell their children slavery was dandy, so she didn’t get that one. But lots of people still hold bigoted views towards women, so that nugget came through just fine. Throw in a pinch of, she’s probably never gotten to know very many women who are happily living lives contrary to her view of what women are supposed to be like, and so ‘worksforme’ turns into ‘mustbetheonlywayforeveryone.’

Indeed, from what I can tell people just kind of ignore this issue, or pretend it doesn’t exist, instead of reconciling it. Their problem is that the usual excuse – “It’s only a metaphor” – doesn’t work here. Even if the story of Adam and Eve is not to be read as a historic event, but more like a fairy tale, one of the clearest morals of that story is “women are inferior”.

Indeed, that’s just what it means. And, of course, there are many other places in the Bible where the inferiority of women is stated or implied. The Ten Commandments, for example, mention wives as chattel, amongst oxen and asses, or “anything that is his“. Thus Abraham did not hesitate to give his wife to other men, pretending that she was his sister, in order to save his skin. In the famous story of Sodom and Gommorah Lot offers his daughters for the amusement of the men, rather than give up his male guests to them. Then, of course, there is Jephthah’s promise to sacrifice the first person he saw on his return home, if the Lord would only grant him the victory. The first person he saw was his daughter, so she was sacrificed. (I think he gave her a month to live her life to the full, and then did the deed.) The scriptures are riddled with stories such as these. It is preposterous to see in the Bible some inerrant word of a god. Phyllis Trible, a feminist biblical scholar, speaks of some of these texts as texts of terror, and tries to account for them in biblical terms. But there are no terms that justify thinking of such texts as anything more than misogynistic writings of early patriarchy. Nor can you simply dispense with them by the metaphorical route.

But of course, scriptures are purely human writings, all of them, without exception, and there is not a single reason that we should accept them as anything else. The myth of divine communication dies hard, but the only sane thing to do is do everything possible to undermine the Bible. Some people, like Jack Spong, recognise the Bible as a human work, but go on to try to preserve the Bible’s central place in our lives. It just doesn’t have this kind of authority, and should not be given it, once we see how very human it is, and the fact that so many people are hysterically attached to trying to fulfil the Bible strictures on human life to the full is a sign that something is badly wrong with the way that children are educated. This is unnatural behaviour. And the attempt of people like Spong to try to meliorate the situation by acknowledging the Bible’s humanity but trying to preserve its authority simply makes people read it all the more fervently as divine writ.

A good book, by the way, that puts all this kind of thing in perspective is Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies. It’s time to finish with the Bible, and take our leave of it. It could be included in a course which studies early writings, thought to be divine, but there is no reason to continue giving the Bible the close attention that is has received. It is becoming obvious that the churches cannot assimilate the findings of historical criticism. The desire for final answers is much too strong.

Unless this woman is a much, much worse person than I’d already consider her by what she’s said thus far, I doubt very much that she bases her views on slavery on the things God has said about it in the Bible.

Oh she probably does accept as moral what the bible says about slavery but she would also likely claim that the “slavery” referred to in the bible isn’t slavery as we know it but is instead “indentured servitude”. Because, you know, that’s totally different.

In Christianity as in Islam, the submissiveness of women to men is modelled on the submissiveness of humans to God. Apparently, when God found all other animals too proud and too independent to serve and worship him, he created docile humans to give him the satisfaction he craved. Then humans, ’emulating’ their creator started demanding the submission of their fellow-humans whenever and wherever they could. The oppression of women by men is only a special case.

Well, in fairness to Christianity, Europe has had far more powerful women ( Queens, Czarinas nad perhaps even a pope or two) than any other culture.

You’ve now posted three articles on the submission of Christian women, and yet it is only in the Judeo-Christian tradition that women have achieved positions of great power, even that of an absolute monarch.

My streets are filling up with women in hijabs and niqabs and even the occasional burkha. I’ve witnessed a number of them walking behind their husbands ( with the Kids of course) or sitting the back seat of the car while hubby sits up front driving.

Islam’s core text assert that 90% of the people in hell are women, so Christianity really can’t compete here. Its just far too wimpy, feminine and ‘metrosexual’.

Christian submission of women soon won’t even atter. In fact, it may look absoltely liberating.

Sonia (#18), there is some truth in what you say, and you might say that the religious life for women did give women the alterantive between domestic servitude and (a qualified kind of) independence. This may be in part the source of the examples of powerful women that you mention. But how many were there before the dawning of modernity, I wonder? At the time of Henry VIII, remember, it was widely thought that a woman could not govern England. Henry certainly thought so; that is why Henry wanted so desperately to remarry, quite aside from the fact that he had met a pretty girl, and preferred her to his deceased brother’s wife, a marriage that was purely dynastic, as many were at the time (and often, no doubt, still are). How much did Christianity really contribute to a revaluation of women? Certainly, from the point of view of Roman law, women lost more than they gained by the ascendency of Christianity, for under Roman law women could own property, divorce their husbands, and had many other legal rights which were lost under Christian supremacy. The fact that there is an increasingly strident patriarchal Christianity attempting to make a comeback does not obviously conflict with much of Christian history, and that people are being indoctrinated with this rubbish should surely worry us. As for it soon not mattering; what is the basis for that, I wonder?

Sonia, yes, I’ve done several posts on Christian submission-for-women, and I’m going to do more. So what? There’s a huge amount of material about the Islamic equivalent here, so it’s ludicrous to complain that I talk about stuff that actually does exist.

It wasn’t actually “the Judeo-Christian tradition” in which women got positions of power; it was primogeniture, which is a different thing. Women didn’t get to be absolute monarchs because Christianity said it was ok, they got to because they were next in the line of succession.

In any case I’m not talking about “the Judeo-Christian tradition”; I’m talking about what I’m talking about – these particular people who say these particular things which they take to be Christian and “biblical.”

You want me to shut up about anything Christian and talk only about Islam. Noted. I’m not going to do that.

Or Genesis Or the entire Old testament (evidently because it contains some timeless truth!) – They arent important except when they are.

Their problem is that the usual excuse – “It’s only a metaphor” – doesn’t work here

Heh – their metaphor doesnt even work for Genesis – but it doesnt stop them from trying. It does feel as if they have skewed sense of priorities ignoring the misogynistic parts.

@Sonia

Well, in fairness to Christianity, Europe has had far more powerful women ( Queens, Czarinas nad perhaps even a pope or two) than any other culture.

thats sort of like arguing – In fairness to hinduism – they had a very powerful woman Prime Minister – Indira Gandhi and the current power broker is her daughter in law so we need to be fair when we complain about Female infanticide or something because the muslims are worse!

comment 18 : I think you are very naive or misinformed. The submission in catholicism is unquestioning but like every system how sick it all is, after centuries it becomes normal. in his book “das kreuz mit der kirche” from german author Deschner he gives a final condemnation of the submission of women. Even Utah-Ranke Heinemann, classmate of the “whitened sepulchre” in rome gives also a final negative conclusion of this crime in her book : “Eunuchen für das himmelreich”.

As many have pointed out, those sharing this patriarchal view cherry pick their inerrant book to fit their needs and ignore that which doesn’t. Their ignorance begins with their creation story by totally ignoring Genesis 1 in favor of the cruder and more primitive story upholding male prideful privilege.

Genesis 1 has male and female being created together on the sixth day with no mention of either sex being privileged one over the other. And with no Sin being committed by either partner and no punishment imposed on the non-sinners, let alone a punishment to be passed down to their descendants for ever and ever.

Just reinforcing Eric’s point @19, I’ll bring my comment across from the St Paul thread:

Paul and the early Christians were engaged, at the time, in an argument over the status of women with many pagans, who thought differently. No-one (bar Plato and a few Stoics) argued that the sexes were equal in terms that we would recognise, but quite a few pagans had a version of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that weighted the woman’s sphere heavily.

This is why the Romans had unilateral no-fault divorce. This is why Roman women kept their property. This is why there were laws against wives guaranteeing their husbands’ debts or other financial commitments, and why it was actually illegal for a woman to seek her husband’s permission to open a bank account. She either did it herself, or no-one did it.

The early Christians set their faces against this system, while other more sexist cultures in the Roman Empire resented it enormously. Greeks complained about their daughters running off with Roman soldiers. Jews complained about Roman women wandering around everywhere unchaperoned, breastfeeding their children in public (including at the theatre and amphitheatre, quelle horreur!) and having authority over men.

Schulz, the great scholar of Roman law (in the midst of arguing for the liberalising of divorce laws in both England and his native Germany, and also joining with H.L.A Hart in arguing for the legalizing of homosexuality between consenting adults in private) made the following observation (in 1950):

The Roman law of marriage as a whole has never been in force in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. It is, nevertheless, of great importance for the history of civilization as well as for critical jurisprudence. It reminds us that a humanistic law of marriage did exist in antiquity for five hundred years and stimulates us to throw off the fetters both of Canon law and of patriarchal philistinism. The classical law of marriage bides its time; it is still a living force.

This is a very old debate. The Christians thought they’d won it when they defeated Roman paganism. The problem is, modernity has now sided with the Romans (on everything when it comes to sex and gender, too: abortion, sex for fun, married women’s property rights, gay rights).

And at least some Christians are really, really unhappy about it. I mean, no-one likes zombies, and Christians thought this other, alternative tradition was not just a closed book, but a burnt and buried one, too.

[Edited to add: the idea that Christianity and Islam contributed to notions of equality is false; that’s an enlightenment ideal, specifically a Scottish Enlightenment ideal, and (at least initially) was quite narrow, pertaining to equality before the law. What Christianity and Islam contributed — the former more than the latter — was moral universalism, which is a different concept.

Moral universalism suggests that everyone has some inherent worth qua people. Most pagans did not accept this; pagans were ethical particularists. Greeks (following Aristotle) believed that some people were ‘natural slaves’, for example. The Roman jurists were a bit smarter than Aristotle, ruling that slavery was contra naturam, against nature, because animals did not submit to it voluntarily, so therefore nor would people. For this reason, Roman slavery was often particularly brutal in practice: if you have no sustaining narrative as to why a given group of people are inferior, it becomes necessary to ‘keep them scared’. A Roman slave owner had power of life and death over his or her slaves, who were also deemed to be always sexually available.

In the Roman version of ethical particularism, lack of talent, beauty or effort was fatal: if you were lazy, you were worthless. The Roman welfare system (annona, often called ‘the corn dole’, but there was more to it than this) only supported people who had spotty or seasonal work (lots of records for olive and fruit pickers, for example). People who made no effort to work at all were allowed to starve, and when Christians set up what we would call the first soup kitchens, pagans laughed at them: ‘you’ll only make more of them, if you keep that up’ was a standard criticism.

If you were born disabled, you were also worthless. Roman law encouraged parents to kill disabled children, but, interestingly, only if they were ugly: beauty was a sign of special favour by the gods, and being blind or deaf does not make one ugly. Allied to this, one of the standard criticisms directed at early Christians (of both sexes) by pagans (of both sexes) was that they had only adopted celibacy because no-one would fuck them anyway (and yes, it was often put that crudely).

The dual heritage of Rome and Christianity is complex and contradictory. When Christians claim that their ascendency improved the status of women, they’re making it up — trying to have their own facts, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere. However, the tree-hugging compassion and environmentalism one associates with modern paganism is also a lie: Roman paganism did not look like that at all. With its ethos of hard work and personal responsibility, its modern political progeny is far closer to Margaret Thatcher than CND or Amnesty International].

You’ve now posted three articles on the submission of Christian women, and yet it is only in the Judeo-Christian tradition that women have achieved positions of great power, even that of an absolute monarch.

This reminds me immensely of Dinesh D’Souza. He likes to credit “Christendom” with the emergence of philosophies which treat people decently. Do you really get points for being dragged, kicking and screaming, into modernity through the Enlightenment, resisting every step of the way? Really?

At any rate, I’m not sure that particular bit even matters. What does matter is this: the philosophy of Dominionism, that is, the advocacy of Christian theocracy, is, in the US, a very real and relevant topic right now, as the two most-discussed Republican presidential candidates espouse this idea. And its treatment of women is one of the most strongly toxic things it espouses, and one of the most backward things it espouses.

Are there worse people in the world? Worse ideologies? Absolutely. Some of them, Islam included, get discussed here often. But I can’t imagine why you’d think it would significantly decrease the importance of the terrible beliefs espoused by major candidates for the leader of this nation. For that matter, I don’t see how these goals aren’t tied together: how could we hope to fight Islamic ill-treatment of women if we don’t have a decent society to point to and say, ‘ this is much different, and it’s better.’

I want to pose a question. What if a woman is her husband’s helper and taking care of his children, doing laundry, house and any other thing to make him a home…He drinks and parties and divorces her? I think there is a certain extent to where a woman should be submissive. This is also the reason, I choose never to marry again.